End of an era in Tel Aviv: In the last hour, the media are reporting on the decision of the Ministry of Transportation to end the activities of the cooperative travel ventures in Abel Dan (in Tel Aviv) and Tik-Tek (in Jerusalem). The ministry responded to the requests of the Dan and Egged companies to end the experiment under the current subsidy conditions – the Babel Dan project has been subsidized by approximately NIS 18 million per year since its launch in 2019 – due to chronic losses and a lower number of passengers than requested. The service will be discontinued on December 31.
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The service was much loved by its users. Babel (Photo: Dean Aharoni Rowland)
The collaborative travel service, a collaboration between the Ministry of Transportation, Dan and the tech company VIA, offered a fleet of black minibuses that could be ordered through a dedicated app, with pick-up and drop-off stations close to the destination and a route determined by an algorithm to enable the shortest travel time. The minibuses themselves excelled in quiet travel due to A ban on cell phone calls, but the service has accumulated many complaints about unavailability, delays and excessively long travel routes. The critics of the service claimed even at the beginning that it is a solution that is more like a subsidized taxi than a supplementary service to a mass transportation system.
Babel (Photo: Dean Aharoni Rowland)
Babel Dan usage data indicates that only about 5,500 people a day use the shared transportation service in the areas of use in Tel Aviv and its surroundings – this adds up to about 115,000 passengers on average per month and that in 38 percent of their travel time the minibuses are empty. The “Calcalist” newspaper calculated and found that the minibus filling factor is 1.57 passengers, which means a little more than one driver and a half passengers in a private car, so even with the easing of the traffic jams it is difficult to see data in favor of the service. On the other hand, for residents on the edges of Tel Aviv such as Jaffa and Givatayim, Bavel was a successful alternative service for long trips by bus.
Either way, they’ll probably have to do without him. Babel recently announced their intention to recruit dozens of drivers and increase the fleet of minibuses in order to expand the service to 10,000 people a day, but that will no longer happen either. The Ministry of Transportation intends to invest the amount of the subsidy for the service in improving public transportation in the city, so maybe something good will come out of this whole story.